On Mars Pathfinder (The Mike Lane Stories Book 1)

by Jim Melanson

  As I stood there admiring its work, Big Dawg pulled up beside me and just sat there. The whole idea of “dog” just struck me rather curious then. I think it was at this point I stopped referring to Big Dawg as “it” in my own mind, and started thinking of the large rover as “he”. Just as fine an example of anthropomorphism as naming your car back on Terra.

  So Big Dawg and I stood there, side by each, just looking around. I was swiveling my head inside my helmet, Big Dawg’s camera head was panning back and forth. Touching the controller on my left forearm, I brought up a small COM window that displayed the automated signals from the PDV so I’d know when it was coming down. It was sequenced to land 200 metres further south and west to avoid the colony and avoid the existing supply drops.

  Being a bit away from the Habitats, and looking at them from this perspective was powerful. The sun was low to the horizon and behind me, in the direction of the upcoming landing. I looked at the Habitats in that sweet light, and things really started to sink in. I had been so busy and so tired that while I had taken time to look around, I hadn’t taken time to get philosophical. I took a sip of water from the sippy-hose in my helmet, and let my mind wander into the high-brow realm.

  The ruminations started with the water I was sipping. The water I was sipping was still Terran water. It was Terran water that was nine months old and had travelled over a hundred million miles, yet it was here with me on the surface of this alien planet and …

  No, wait. It wasn’t an alien planet. Not any more it wasn’t. Mars was no longer an alien world to me. Planeta Martes was now home. It was my home. I had no way to return to Terra, and I would never go back to Terra again; for the rest of my life. I had made a very bold and permanent change of address: Mike Lane, PO Box #1, Mars.

  From this point on, I was “from” Mars. If I stepped on a space ship right now, travelled across the galaxy, and landed on another world; when the inhabitants asked, “where are you from”, I would have to say, “Mars”. This was it. I had emigrated. There was no return to Earth for me. There was no return vessel, no return plan, no way back. Period. Ad infinitum.

  I was okay with that. I had wanted this. I signed up for this. I asked for it. Granted, the original plan had some company coming with me; but hey, a few years alone could do the soul good. I hoped it would. I realized that I had been right about bringing the empty feeling, the long familiar heart ache, with me. Loreena would have hated it here; but she would have loved it for my sake. I remembered how freaked she’d been watching a movie about Mars and some ghosts, how she’d buried her Amazon body in my arms, and hid her face in my neck; her curly dark red hair tickling my nose. I smiled. There really was a ghost on Mars now.

  I looked up at the paleness of the sky, it wasn’t Terran sky, it was Martian sky and it was now my sky. I could see some of the stars in the low light of the Martian north polar midnight. I was close enough, in galactic proximity to Terra, for them to appear the same as on Terra. Still, there was something different about them, something ever-so-slightly different, that I couldn’t put my finger on.

  I looked down and kicked the regolith. Humphhh. Back on Terra I would have thought that I was kicking the earth. While technically, it could be considered “earth” that was beneath my feet, the word that my mind kept using was “soil” and “regolith”. It’s the small things I guess.

  Tired from a very long day and still adjusting to gravity’s effect on me, I hopped up on the cargo deck of Big Dawg, and then I just sat there swinging my legs like a child. I continued looking at the ground. There were no blades of grass. No tufts of green grass, or dead wheat coloured grass, sticking up anywhere. There were no leaves blowing around. All I could hear was the subtle hiss of my Activity Suit’s air system, my own breathing, and the occasional low volume beep and twitter from the COM unit. The absence of Terran normal sensory input and the future life ahead of me, imprisoned in a life of an isolated freedom, didn’t bother me at all.

  I think the events of the day showed what was going to be most challenging: keeping a rein in on childhood fears. Adult fears were no problem for me. I faced those head-on and squarely, confident that I walked with God on a daily basis. If I stood with Him, who could stand against me? I applied that to the childhood fears as well, but those fears still had some powerful psychological mojo that snuck up on me, and poked me in the ribs sometimes. When those fears hit, faith or not, it still takes a few minutes to corral those ponies and tame them down. I thought about that long ago night for a moment. That time when I was five years old and they came in the middle of the night. That was almost fifty years ago. I think the fact that General Rosewood had simply said, “We know”, made it something even more terrifying for me. I only had partial memory of that night. As a child, it was scary; I remember most the helpless terror. As an adult, I can look back on those memories objectively, when I choose to look back on them. It’s just that sometimes, those memories pop up and they surprise me at the oddest times. That’s when the panic hits, the sense of being suffocated by the fear, the feeling of helplessness. So long as I could choose my own ground, my own time and place of facing these things, I knew that I could handle them calmly. I knew I could handle them without re-experiencing that middle-of-the-night-terror.

  I sat there for another thirty minutes being all philosophical about my new life, and thankfully, other less weighty matters. I kept checking the PDV status, getting a little more impatient the closer it came to touchdown. It was ready to break atmo, and start descent.

  That’s when the PRIORITY indicator popped up on the HUD. It was a text message. I reached for the controller on my arm and opened the message in my HUD.

  The message was from Ernst. It simply said, “Look behind you”.

  Look Behind You

  Ernst had not left Mission Control since the appearance of the grey ball almost twelve hours ago. He had been near the end of his shift when it appeared. After that, his replacement couldn’t make him leave. So, the replacement just joined him. Two sets of eyes were, after all, better than one. Frankie was also an ESA spook, and shared duties with Ernst and one other person. Frankie had spent the early part of his life as a CIA analyst and then had moved on to private consulting for corporations with a global footprint. Finally, retiring at age forty-four, he had been picked up by the ESA to do things that simply interested him. Spooking on the Mars colony mission definitely interested him.

  Ernst and Frankie were playing back Jalopy-Sat footage exclusively. Carrie had helped Ernst earlier or rather, Ernst request for help from Carrie had given her something new to pursue. It became a much more valuable lead after the grey ball shot away. She was now in her own office, also refusing to go home, conducting her own research. Arno was with her as well.

  About an hour before the PDV was due to set down, Carrie and Arno were back in Mission Control. The big screen at the front showed Mike exiting the W-Hab. The night shift Mission Control Director, Karl, Hans’ brother (no nepotism I assure you), announced that Mike was going outside to watch the PDV’s descent. Many heads turned to just look at him a moment, causing a sheepish grin to creep across his face. Master of stating the obvious, was the immediate thought in his head, poking fun at himself.

  Through Ernst’s investigations, with Frankie’s assistance, they, (Carrie and Arno) had determined that the “shimmer” effect had been present around the colony site from almost the same moment the Lander was touching down. It had even gotten very close, and then zoomed away just as the Lander exploded. Ernst was really tired by this time, and he didn’t catch the significance of the twinkle of light that Carrie and Arno had questioned. It would eventually be Carrie that confirmed it was a pulse-energy weapon striking the Lander. In his defence, it looked like a glint of sunlight. That sounded like a perfectly reasonable explanation for the anomalous appearance of that tiny flash of light. Perfectly reasonable, that is, until Carrie and Arno had realized at the same moment, the twinkle was on the shaded side of the Lander.
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  Ernst and Frankie, however, had compiled the footage and tracker-cam telemetry that showed the exact position and route of the “shimmer” (or as Ernst and Frankie now thought of it), the “cloaked ship”. This data covered the Lander’s arrival until the grey ball departed.

  When the announcement was made that Mike was going outside to observe the PDV landing, Ernst and Frankie saved their research files, then switched to the current live-ish feed from Jalopy-Sat. I say live-ish because the feed was, technically, live. It was, technically, real-time as well, even though it was delayed a bit over eighteen minutes. It was live and real-time in the sense that as soon as it arrived from Relay-1, the feed was presented on their monitors. However, it was a live and real-time video feed of something that had happened eighteen minutes ago.

  Viewing their live-ish feed, Ernst and Frankie watched Mike walk over towards the supply drop site. They saw the six existing drops lined up neatly, and saw Mike being approached by the big rover. They saw it stop beside him as Mike stood there looking around. They saw Mike hop up and sit on the cargo deck of the big rover. It was only a moment later when the image zoomed out on them. They hadn’t touched anything, and were about to look at each other when the red capital letters displayed on the upper left corner of the screen:

  ENGAGING HOSTILE REFERENCE

  In unison, their eyes widened, and they both gasped quietly and leaned back. They both adjusted their glasses, and then both leaned in closer to the monitor, in perfect unison. They both pointed to the same point on the monitor at the same time, both nodding silently. Two peas in a pod, they both saw the “shimmer” was back, the cloaked alien ship.

  The tracking system on Jalopy-Sat learned as it worked. Through the assistance of the techs on Terra (Ernst and his compatriots), objects on the surface that might move around were tagged and identified. If Mike’s Activity Suit’s IFF signal or the rovers moved outside the 500 metre exclusion zone, the tracker would identify them, and queue them to be followed if there was nothing more interesting to follow. The techs could also put the system in bypass mode to ignore all known and referenced objects. The alert for “engaging hostile reference” meant the tracking system had detected movement by something that was tagged as “hostile” in its database, or something that was not tagged in its database, could not be identified by its shape and size and was pursuing a direct course towards the colony site. The term “reference” meant someone sitting at the terminal. Ernst was sitting at had identified it as a potential hostile target in the database; something that might need to be destroyed. The “engaging” part meant that the tracker camera was following it, and ipso facto, so was the targeting system; and ipso facto again, so was a hellish death and destruction from orbit high above. Whatever it was could have Thermobaric-Hell descend on it in under three minutes, if the man on Mars wanted it to be so.

  In this case, the unknown reference was a slight surface shimmer, moving over the ice-field wall towards the plains and towards the colony. Earlier in the day, Ernst had tagged that shimmer as a hostile target, and the targeting system now recognized it optically. As they watched it, the shimmer moved over the ice-wall and across the plains, headed towards where Mike was sitting on the rover’s cargo deck. Frankie stood up looking towards the Mission Director and inhaling sharply. Ernst quickly grabbed him and sat him roughly back down in his seat. He glared at him and held a finger up to his pursed lips. Truthfully, Ernst didn’t really know why he made Frankie be quiet. In a few minutes someone else would notice the shimmer on the big monitor. As he thought about his motivation for silencing Frankie, Ernst realized it was just his own secretive nature. Given the parameters of his assignment on this project, maybe he would have to work on that. It would, however, would be something for later thought.

  Focused on the monitor, the pair of spooks watched the shimmer stop moving. It was behind Mike’s back and hovering over the plains. It was only about 100 metres away from Mike’s position. Ernst drummed the desktop for a minute. They watched Mike just sitting on the cargo deck.

  “We have to say something,” Frankie said, strident and glaring right into Ernst’s eyes, as Ernst turned to look at him.

  “Yah, but not to them. Too much panic in here, and nothing vill be achieved. Ve don’t know its intentions at zeh moment.” Ernst turned back to the screen, his own words sounding hollow in his head. His fingers tapped the keyboard, and the priority COM window opened. It was a simple system that allowed one line of text to be sent to the Colony recipient, and it was transmitted ahead of whatever data may currently be spooled for transmission. Twitter for outer space, if you want. It could even be used terminal to terminal at Mission Control; but that would be frowned upon by most people as too secretive. This wasn’t, unfortunately in Ernst and Frankie’s minds, a black-op government operation. Openness and sharing were key words in the work environment here, and it was something they were both struggling to get used to.

  Ernst paused for a moment and then typed his simple message: Look behind you.

  First Contact

  If anyone else had sent that message, I wouldn’t have had the body shivering chill hit my spine like an out of control locomotive. I jumped off the back of the rover and assumed a crouched position. As soon as my head popped up, over the edge of the rover deck, there was a brilliant flash of light coming from what I recognized as the “shimmer”; probably the one from earlier today. I ducked just in time. I swear I heard the crackling of electricity as the translucent energy ball passed over my head and exploded the ground only 10 metres from where I was crouched. I popped my head up quickly for a better look at the “shimmer”, but it wasn’t there.

  “Frak me.” It was a very poignant thought at this moment that whatever this situation was going to be, I had to handle it quickly. There was no backup, there was no aid, and there was no one to rescue me if I got injured. I turned my body and head slowly to look for the “shimmer”. I thought about the energy weapons sitting in their secret compartment. They were certainly not going to do me any good in there.

  I looked back at the W-Hab, but it was almost half a kilometre away. There was no way I could cover that open ground before the alien vessel could fire another round or four at me. I peered around the front end of Big Dawg; I was only a few metres from the first supply drop. I could make a dash for there, and maybe use that and the other drops as cover, but that was just going to wind up being a game of cat and mouse. I looked around the ground as I kept glancing upwards looking for the shimmer of the alien vessel. The only thing I had at my disposal was rocks, most of them a bit bigger than a hockey puck. I picked up one in each hand: they would have to do. I sighed, then muttered, “Just call me Grog, the Martian Caveman.”

  Teviot Vallis

  Located approximately 32 degrees south of the Martian equator and 83 degrees east of the Martian Prime Meridian, Hellas Planitia is easily visible from Terra with a telescope, even a cheap one. Unfortunately, it’s just slightly out of range of the optics on Mar-Sat and Jalopy-Sat, due to its relative position to Chasma Boreale, and the steep curvature of Mars surface. Hellas Planitia is an impact crater that is 2,300 kilometres wide. Its depth is from 4 to 8 kilometres below the Martian datum (sea level). It is 9 kilometres deep if you count the rim of the crater. Yes, I said kilometres. To put this in more perspective, the area of the Hellas Planitia impact crater is approximately 4.15 million square kilometres. The area of the United Kingdom is only 243,000 square kilometres. You could fit the entire United Kingdom inside Hellas Planitia, seventeen times. That makes it big enough to hold almost one half of Canada’s land mass, more than half of the United States of America.

  On the eastern rim of Hellas Planitia, amongst the debris curtains, impact craters, and relatively smaller Planitias, Mons and plateaus, are three large valleys. These are regarded as the sources of the fluvial flow patterns and sedimentary deposits inside the Hellas’ impact crater. They are Dao Vallis, Niger Vallis and Harmakhis Vallis. Hellas Planitia is actually
deep enough to allow sufficient atmospheric pressure at its deepest levels, that if there were water at the bottom of the crater, it could exist without boiling off. At the top off the southernmost Harmakhis Vallis, ostensibly a large tributary to Harmakhis Vallis, is Reull Vallis. This flow channel stretches eastward almost 1,500 kilometres, and is 7 kilometres at its widest point. About halfway along Reull Vallis, east of the head of Harmakhis Vallis, is the much smaller Teviot Vallis. Teviot Vallis is only 140 kilometres in length. It is barely noticeable compared to what is around it. Such inconspicuousness suited the Eridani just fine.

  The Eridani settlement had existed in excavated subterranean tunnels and chambers on the western wall of Teviot Vallis for close to 700 years. Originally an outpost for secret propulsion experiments, it became an exo-biological research station that quickly rose to be the most prominent in this sector of the Eridani Dominion. Almost all of the Eridani warmongering came from their need to engage in biological research.

  Critical to their needs, as it would be for anyone going to Mars, was water. Terran research missions and satellite measurements projected the terrain around this region is filled with water only a few hundred metres below the surface. The Eridani could confirm this, as they have an extensive drilled water system that supplied all their needs, it was the basis of the original propulsion research, and could supply a much larger footprint of consumers than it currently did. Without digressing too much further, I will say that in later years, their choice of location caused problems not only for themselves, but also for the colonist expansions. Thankfully that came later and not right now, as the region around Teviot Vallis, Euripus Mons specifically, was one that had been considered by the Corporation as a colony site!